Summer Classes and Adventures in Public Transportation

In my last post I mentioned that I'm taking summer classes.

For those of you who don't know, summer classes are super-condensed classes that cover an entire semester in 3-5 weeks. Mine is a 3 week class, so that means I have class from 8:30-11:20 AM EVERY DAY until June 3rd. I also had to buy an $80 book for it.

Fortunately the class is Nutrition 100. I thought this would have something to do with nutrition. It doesn't. It's basically like college P.E. We have lecture for an hour and then we go to the rec and work out. Every day. Best class ever? It is a little disheartening that I'm paying for credit hours to go work out every morning (along with my student fees that cover my rec membership).

I just realized I complain about paying for college a lot. It's a valid complaint.

So anyway, since I'm living at home this summer, class every day is fairly inconvenient. It's about a 20 minute drive to campus one way. So I'd be spending about 40 min in the car everyday and going through a crap ton of gas. Plus I'd have to buy a parking permit.

I've decided I'm not going to drive to class this summer.

That may have a lot to do with the fact that my car is completely empty and I'm avoiding buying gas as long as possible. It's more than just saving money though. It's being green and while one less car on the streets isn't going to make a huge difference, every little bit helps. (And remember Gas Boycotting (Or "An Easy Way to Change the World")? Exactly).

Day 1 of summer class I biked 8 miles each way to get to class. It worked well. Lincoln's got a pretty decent bike trail system that can get you pretty much anywhere in the city. Not so well was that my knee kind of kills from riding a bike that wasn't mine and a little small. I need to fix mine and haven't had a chance. Biking is great because, well I love biking, but it's super nice out and exercise and all that.

Day 2 was the bus. Knee=no biking today (plus I'm going to P.E. class!) This is where things get interesting. UNL students get a free bus pass that lasts for a year, so if you can navigate the confusing mess of bus routes and schedules, it works fairly well. Unfortunately, Lincoln's public transportation system is not as convenient as it's bike trail network, but it's not bad. I may have done a lot of unnecessary walking because I wasn't sure exactly where to get on or off the bus, but I made it to and from class. I'm lucky to live a couple blocks from a bus stop that goes downtown though. And it's about a 30-40 minute ride, which seems like a lot, but I worked on my homework. Nerd, I know.

It was slightly concerning because the bus driver was a very aggressive driver. He was going ridiculously fast (for a bus) and honked a lot. He even opened the bus door to cuss out a lady in her car. I made it home in 25 minutes though =)

Gas Boycotting (Or "An Easy Way to Change the World")

So I was going through my Facebook newsfeed, (because let's face it, college kids have nothing better to do and creeping on my "friends" is more interesting than my paper that is due tomorrow) and I saw an event for "Don't Buy Gas on March 31!" or something like that. Ok cool.

Then I saw it again, except for March 14th. I figured they just changed the date or something until I saw one for March 10 and I realized there are several different events of essentially the same exact thing for the same purpose, just on different days in March.

After a quick scan of my newsfeed, here are all the different (but same!) ones that I found:

Don't pump gas on March 14 2011 "GAS OUT"
No Gas Day on March 31
Gas Strike on March 10

All of these events had at least a hundred thousand people marked as "attending" and a quick facebook search of "gas boycott" brought up several more results including one set for St. Patrick's Day, one during March Madness, and a lot still protesting the BP oil spill last April. A Google search of "gas boycott 2011" the same thing also brought up results for a April 15 gas boycott. The idea is that by not buying gas for one day, it will influence the oil companies to lower gas prices.

While these people have the right idea, it's not going to change the world. Why not?

First, if there's anything I've learned from being on student government at a Division 1 university, if you're going to plan the exact same event as someone else, coordinate efforts. Trust me, it'll work better that way.

Second? "Sure, I'll boycott gas on March 14th. I'll just make sure to fill up on the 13th." See the problem here? It's not going to change the amount of gas bought. Just because people refuse to buy gas on one day doesn't mean that they aren't ever going to buy gas again.

I finally found one group that seems to have it right. It's called Gas Boycott-MORE THAN ONE DAY. You don't like the price of gas? It's getting too expensive to fill up your car (or Expedition)? Don't buy it. Not just for one day, don't buy it EVER. Invest in a bicycle. Or a bus pas. UNL students get them for free (the bus pass, not the bike).

I'm serious. Granted, Nebraska winters don't have the best biking conditions, but I can definitely get by in the summer without driving, at least not very much. And I take the bus everyday to class and carpool to my practicum off-campus. I buy gas maybe once a month, if that, and in the summer when I can ride my bike, it's a lot less.

According to an About.com article, a gas boycott probably won't lower gas prices much anyway, since gasoline only accounts for 20% of each barrel of crude oil. Unless you can reduce the demand for OIL that much, gas prices aren't going to go down. Oil is 55% of the price of gas, so even if the oil companies are hit hard (which they won't be after only 1 day of boycotting), it's not likely that gas will suddenly be less than $2 a gallon (and remember when we thought that was expensive?)

Even BP, the oil giant that saw mass boycotts last spring after the oil spill, wasn't affected much. The gas boycotts mainly hurt the people who owned and operated the local station, said an article in the Boston Globe published in June. The boycotts hardly made a dent in BP's overall earnings.

The same Boston Globe article said that Greenpeace wasn't endorsing the boycotts. The best way to make a difference was to actually move "beyond petroleum."

So as the Beatles put it,

You say you want a revolution
Well you know
We'd all want to change the world

There's a lot of talk and we all want to make a difference, so what are we going to do about it?

Adventures!

So today, my roomie and I came back from lunch and...our door wouldn't open.  We have the key card things like in hotels, and neither of our keys worked.  Apparently our battery had died.  What???  They're supposed to flash red before they die, but for reasons unknown, ours didn't.  So we had to sit out in the hallways for like forever and wait for Elmer to come fix it for us. 

Elmer is awesome by the way, he's our building maintenance guy.

The really funny this is that there was a guy interviewing the girls across the hall from us for journalism class, and he was asking them if they had had any strange, unexpected things happen to them this week.  As we were trying unsuccessfully to get into our room.

Luckily, neither of us had class right away in the near future, I just didn't get my homework done.

Now I'm off to the bus stop to trek to East Campus!  Because for more reasons unknown, UNL decided to have two campuses, and the one is like 20 blocks away.  So we have to bus, which is ok, more adventures!  Hopefully this time we make it to the bus stop in time though, cuz last week we literally had to sprint after the bus until it stopped at a red light.  It was classic. 

Tip of the Day: Be on time!